Reimagining Kratos from the Original God of War in Blender & ZBrush

Introduction

Hi there, I’m James Nikko “JN” Dizon, and I’ve been doing 3D art for the last 6 years. I started my game development career doing environment art and eventually became a 3D character artist while working at Ubisoft Philippines. I previously worked on Skull and Bones and am currently working on an unannounced project. 

Before getting into 3D art, I graduated from university as a programmer majoring in Computer Science while doing illustration as a side gig but later fell in love with 3D while working a non-art job in Japan. The draw towards 3D initially grew from my feeling of getting stuck trying to advance my career as an illustrator, but I eventually enjoyed learning about the tech and the workflows done by artists when making the games that I played. I built up my skill set mostly through online resources and advice from some friends who were already in the industry, and even now I’m still doing my best to improve those skills.

Today, I’ll be sharing a breakdown of the process involved in my latest personal project, a modern reimagining of Greek-era Kratos from the God of War series.

The Third Take

There were actually two models of Kratos that I’d made before this one – the first one was in 2018 when I had just started trying out character art, and the second was in 2019 when I was working as an Environment Artist. I like to go back and remake old works, as it gives me an immense sense of satisfaction and a more concrete metric of improvement in watching my skills progress over the years. In this case, I felt like I could still push a bit more and really show that improvement over the last four years, so I decided it was time for the third take.

This time, I wanted to approach making a Kratos fan art by making a variant that hasn’t been explored much by fan artists in recent years – the original vision of Kratos from God of War 1. Admittedly, I never had a PlayStation 2 as a teen, only a PlayStation Portable where I played God of War: Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta, but my experiences with the character and his development in both 2018 and Ragnarök inspired me to want to revisit the character once again. When I have time, I might go back and actually play the older games – if I’m not struck with the urge to create another 3D character, that is.

References

Normally when working on a character I tend to have more references, particularly ones that draw from real life, but in this case, since I’m recreating a character that exists without a live-action counterpart, I stuck more closely to the in-game reference of a modded Kratos without a beard. Later on, I did find a real-world person who had similar features, a Bulgarian actor and celebrity by the name of Tsvetan/Cvetan Hristov, but I had a hard time finding high-resolution images, so there was a lot of interpolation on my end. I kept my reference sheet relatively small as I didn’t want too much influence from outside the game series to color my view while I worked on this project.

Sculpting

The majority of my work on the head and body was in ZBrush; I utilized the subdivision workflow once I had locked down the primary shapes as I find it much easier for me to make bigger shape changes in low and mid poly counts rather than working mostly in DynaMesh. Once those were all set, I moved on to the secondary and tertiary forms. 

When it came to skin detail, after applying a generic noise as a base, I projected a displacement map I got from purchasing head models in the 3D Scan Store, allowing me to control the level of granularity in the skin details in layers. After that, I utilized brushes from ZBrush Guides to add in pores and other details that I may have missed when projecting the displacement map.

When modeling the facial hair, a lot of the process was just duplicating and remapping hair cards manually to build up the shape of his iconic goatee. I usually do hair modeling after the textures are done so I can see how the hair looks against the texture of the character. I also like to use a bright texture on the cards (in this case, the normal map) to allow me to see them better in the modeling stage.

Outfit & Weapon

For the outfit, the majority of the work was done in ZBrush, extracting parts from the body and ZRemeshing them to get a relatively cleaner topology and then working on the details in higher subdivisions. For cloth parts, I add thickness where I can so I have a mental image of how each part will interact once I’ve retopologized the pieces and to provide a buffer to avoid interpenetration for when I rig each element.

For the pteruges, I extracted and straightened out a single piece and ZRemeshed it to get a relatively clean topology, and then used ZModeler to create the inset lining on the piece. I then used the IMM button from the default ZBrush library to create the stud. Once that was done, I duplicated the pteruge around the lower body area to show up mostly on the sides that didn’t have any cloth on them but also had some pieces that were underneath the cloth. The footwear was similarly made with the extract and ZRemesh method, then subdivided and sculpted on for details. 

I usually like to simulate production when I make personal work so I stay on edge and make sure I don’t get overly relaxed in my comfort zone – I really enjoy the challenge that this brings as it forces me to get really creative with my workflow. The bandages on the character are where this workflow really helped – the God of War 1 design has a lot of repeating bandages and I saw that manually doing each one would take a lot of time that could be used focusing on another aspect of the entire project. So in this case, I decided to use a quick tool in my library of IMM assets to populate the bandages throughout the character. The Bandage Brush InsertMesh Set from Jake Waddington was really useful as it comes with folds and details which really saved time and allowed me to focus more on the texturing stage of the character.

For the Blades of Chaos, I was a lot faster and looser, keeping the high poly mesh mostly free of damages and detailing as I wanted those details to be more apparent in the texturing stages. Once more, Extract, ZRemesh, and ZModeler became my best friends in this step, allowing me to rapidly create the recognizable shapes of the Blades.

The chains were even simpler in comparison to the costume and the Blades – I created a single chain link, rotated it 90 degrees, and duplicated that pair until it reached the length I wanted. After that, I created a simple rig to allow me to “pose” the chain in any way; I utilized this rig for both the chains on the blades and the chains around his arms, adjusting the mesh manually on the arm chains after the rough position was decided.

Retopology & Unwrapping

Most of my modeling and retopology work in this project was in ZBrush and Blender, but I actually personally prefer UV unwrapping in 3ds Max as I just personally find the cutting and unfolding process faster. For the accessories, I utilized UDIM layouts for exporting to Substance 3D Painter in order to keep my materials consistent across each individual costume element. 

Texturing

Texturing is the most fun part of each project for me as it relates most closely to my origins as an illustrator and painter. You can do a lot of storytelling with the textures alone, and it’s just downright fun to drag a brush across your character’s skin or clothes and really nail down the look you want.

When working on the skin, I didn’t want to make him look overly ghostly pale as in the original trilogy; I wanted a look much closer to the 2018 and Ragnarök versions to provide a level of continuity between those designs and mine but also didn’t want to make his skin too natural. So I ended up using a combination of layers to create his skin’s look. Starting from a head texture projected from the 3D Scan Store head that I used for the displacement map, I slowly added noise-based masks to create the granular feeling implying the ashes of his family stuck onto his skin, topping off with more color adjustments to rein the skin back to a relatively more human color while still retaining the ghostly pallor.

For the tattoo, it was simply a matter of painting in the color layer as a mask, breaking the edges using Directional Blur and Warp to create the feeling of the ink bleed and adjusting the roughness to make it pop more in the light. It was relatively straightforward and I really.

I ended up utilizing a lot of masks on the outfit to bring out the detail, being careful not to overdo the wear and tear of his outfit – after all, we’re looking at a Kratos who is still in the middle of his service to the gods of Olympus and only just beginning his path towards revenge against them.

So I used only a medium amount of wear to indicate that despite him already serving the gods for ten years by this time, he had not yet gone on his rampage for his outfit to reflect the bloody path that he took.

Curvature-based masks are my favorite masks in Substance 3D Painter since they’re extremely versatile and easy to add manual painting on top of to remove the procedural look of generators and grunge masks. Also, whenever I apply any mask that relies on the geometry, I usually add a Warp filter to break the edges and keep the transition from looking overly sharp.

Presentation

I really enjoy using Marmoset Toolbag 4 for my projects – the ray tracing is incredible and the drag-and-drop approach makes the setup super quick for characters with a lot of materials. The ability to import saved Actions and animations from FBX files is also very useful, though in this case, I chose to just import an Action pose that I made with the rig that I set up in Blender. I must say that rigging used to be an alien thing for me but Blender made it a lot more approachable and easy to set up.

When rendering realistic characters, I find that good modeling and texturing only do part of the job, and the rest of it is in the character’s motion and expression and how you frame the shots to really capture them. For this project, I decided to frame the portrait render to capture his subtle yet intense gaze to relay a feeling of building tension.

Lighting

Lighting was relatively straightforward – for this one, I didn’t really apply the standard three-point lighting setup as I wanted to really capture the essence of Kratos, so I used a natural outdoor sky HDRI from Marmoset Toolbag, added a couple of directional rim lights with a cooler color temperature and a subtle orange underglow to create nice reflections on the Blades of Chaos. I also included a backdrop mesh to create a nice gradient background so that all the rim lights could have nice contrasts against it. Initially, I had wanted to use the lighting that I’d used on my WIP shots, but then later realized that the previous setup didn’t work for the feel that I wanted to go for here. There’s a lot of trial and error involved here, but I feel that the most important thing is to strike a balance between the lighting looking great in showing off your character and getting the ‘feel’ of the lighting right.

Conclusion

The whole project took around a month and a half of work during my free time, with most of the time going into sculpting, texturing, and rigging. A lot of people wonder why I choose to create even more 3D characters in my free time when I already do that at work, but the reality is that I really enjoy doing it and coming up with nice ways to improve my workflow not only at home but also at work.

The biggest challenge was deciding to rig the project myself. Before this project I would either collaborate with my coworkers for rigging, pose characters in ZBrush, or just stick the models into Mixamo and hope for the best when it came to the auto-skinning. But Blender really made it easy to step out of my comfort zone and create a quick but clean rig that ended up working really well for the pose that I wanted Kratos to make, and I’m really happy with what I ended up making.

For anyone starting out with character art, the biggest piece of advice I can give is to actually finish projects and put them out into the world. I know it can be intimidating to do that, but you’ll never know what your progress will look like if you don’t actually post your work in a finished state. It also doesn’t hurt to look back at your previous work and take another crack at it just to see what it would look like at your current skill level – the results may actually surprise you.

Feel free to drop me a DM on my ArtStation, I try my best to respond to questions and comments when I can. 

James Nikko “JN” Dizon, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie